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If Whitney Chadwick, among other art historians, makes the case that Cassatt’s and Berthe Morisot’s concentration on images of domestic life was not only the result of gendered limitations but, rather, part of the ethos of Impressionism, “as much an expression of the bourgeois family as a defense against the threat of rapid urbanization and rapid industrialization; domestic interiors, private gardens, seaside resorts,” nevertheless most significant writing on nineteenth-century French painting focuses on public spaces not open to such women.

Griselda Pollock has constructed a grid of the spaces of modernity based on Baudelaire’s signal essay The Painter of Modern Life, indicating which zones were open to men and women, and which exclusively to men, as primary subjects and as agents of aesthetic activity—women were limited to “theater (loge)” and “park” while men could also enjoy “Theater (backstage), “Cafés,” “Folies,” and “Brothels”—and art historians such as T. J. Clark in The Painting of Modern Life, privilege works done in precisely those public spheres not open to upper-class and bourgeois women.

Nevertheless, such women did go out into the world. For instance, as a young woman in Paris, Cassatt went to see the cancan:

The most daring thing Cassatt and Haldeman did during their month-long fête was to go to the infamous Jardin Mabille, an outdoor dance hall and theater known for its risqué dancers. The energetic cancan with dancing women who tossed their skirts up over their heads, revealing a minimum of undergarments, was enough to make respectable women blush. The two friends were able to watch with some degree of ease only because their escort politely turned his back to the stage.

Whether the proprieties of the time prevented Cassatt from making an image of it, perhaps from even wanting to make an image of it, nevertheless her exposure to its wildness has to be taken into account in her overall self-positioning as an artist. Yet, what Cassatt chose not to represent may be as significant as what she did represent. In [another version of] At the Opera, she investigates the mechanism of the male gaze, and of the counter-phenomenon of female specular agency, by depicting a male voyeur focusing his gaze on the central figure of the woman who is looking through her opera glasses. But what is she looking at? There are no ballerinas in Cassatt’s paintings.

—Mira Schor

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